Digital monetization has long been an elusive concept for much of the internet. ‘How to make money online’ returns 4,720,000,000 results from Google. Article after article, blog after blog, all promising to show you the way to the golden streets of digital income.
And it should come as no surprise. Over 600 million of the world’s 1.7 billion websites are blogs. That’s before you start counting podcasts (over 1 million on Itunes alone), Youtube channels (31+ million and counting) and a whole host of solopreneur/small businesses digital ventures.
With all these people and companies striving to make a living online, surely there must be a straightforward, accessible, fair way of doing so? Sadly, it’s not that simple
The Old Way
One runway success of the internet (for FAANG shareholders at least) has been online advertising. Providing free-at-the-point of use products and services to millions of consumers, these companies have created fortunes like the world has never seen.
A significant portion of this fortune has been created through online advertising. Projected to hit $517 billion in total ad spend by 2023, the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon benefit hugely from this revenue source.
As a result, digital business owners are often left scrambling to bootstrap their websites and generate income. Pay-per-click banner adverts (PPC) – essentially selling digital billboard space – is a tried and tested strategy for higher traffic websites. Affiliate marketing comes next, which is much less visually offensive for the reader, but often just as jarring.
We run into similar problems with alternative forms of content creation too. Youtube, owned by Google, will split income from monetized ads with the content creator. The caveat? Google can change the terms and conditions of its revenue-share agreement at the drop of the hat, and has done so, repeatedly.
It quickly becomes obvious that digital monetization is a hard graft. Website owners will spend significant amounts of time and energy diversifying their income, with sadly many failing to ever gain traction.
Out With The Old, In With The New
What if it was possible to organically generate income from each website visitor? Not only that, what if that visitor could receive tangible value in exchange for their attention and time?
It turns out that most of us own a significantly underutilized resource, that when leveraged properly, can be used to great effect.
That resource is spare computer processor power. When harnessed, it’s possible for this power to be put to use and generate real-world value. Gather has done just that, creating a self-perpetuating monetization ecosystem built on leveraging spare processing capacity.
Publishers are easily able to insert a few lines of code into the relevant pages of their website or applications. Even commonly used applications like Spotify and mobile games can provide input to the Gather ecosystem. Once set up, website visitors and or application users are able to opt-in, allowing them to leverage their unused computing power. Income is generated from the number of visitors for the time they spend in the website or application, and shared between the publisher and end user.
As a result, the visitor experience is substantially improved. Publications, free from the bane of PPC banner ads and affiliate links, are able to concentrate more on quality content, and less on income diversification. Computing costs can also be reduced by taking advantage of Gather Cloud’s processing sharing capabilities – driving down costs and increasing profit margins.
Making Digital Monetization Mainstream
And that’s just the beginning. Imagine an internet where anyone can set up a blog or website and begin monetizing it almost immediately, where visitors receive rewards for viewing or watching content, and where the accrued value can be compounded through simple staking mechanisms.
Publishers and digital enterprises would finally have the permission to entirely re-imagine the way they conduct their business. Focusing on quality output, not constant revenue diversification, might even change the way we view commerce and the internet itself. (What an exciting time we live.?)
Written by Scott Weathers
